Prior systems and methods for making sausage, such as canned Vienna sausages and other sausage products, typically involve stuffing a blended meat emulsion or paste into a casing. The meat product and the casing are cooked, typically using smoke house and rapid heating such as boiling, frying or other direct heating methods, such as Ohmic heating and exposure to microwave or radio frequency (RF) energy. The casing is then removed or stripped from the cooked sausage, and the cooked sausage is cut to desired lengths. The cut sausages are packed into cans or other containers, topped with broth or other additives, and sterilized. The canned sausages can then be shipped for sale, storage, or consumption.
Conventional systems and methods for making casingless sausage, however, can be improved. For example, sausages and related meat products should be prepared without the need to utilize a casing or other skin that is stuffed with a food item and then subsequently removed or stripped from the cooked food item. Eliminating casings and the related stuffing and stripping processing steps reduces product costs, simplifies production, and increases production rates. Further, when a sausage or other similar product is heated with conventional rapid heating methods, such as microwave energy, the rapid heating typically hardens the sausage as a result of coagulation of proteins and binding of the emulsion components. The hardened sausage can be more difficult to pump and process, thereby inhibiting efficient sausage production. Moreover, heating a sausage product with only rapid heating techniques can consume significant amounts of energy, thereby further increasing production costs.
A need, therefore, exists for a system and a method for preparing a casingless sausage product in a more time, cost and energy efficient manner, without sacrificing the quality and taste.